Religion as Cultural OCD

May 01, 2024 by Joe Gray in Ethics, Freedom, Philosophy, Religion, Thoughts

Would you rather do something because you think it has value or live with the harsh truth that what your doing is nonsense? Sometimes giving it up means losing that value you thought was there. If so, you would have to find value in other things and other activities. It might even be possible to engage in those activities for different reasons and retain the value that derives from them. If one gives up religion they give up a set a way of life and the consequences of that should not to be taken lightly.

God only talks? Thoughts on this slavery debate.

January 05, 2024 by Joe Gray in Atheism, Thoughts, Religion, Rants, Philosophy

During the debate, there are many considerations about what god can and can not do. This contradicts the notion that god is “all-powerful”. If god wanted something to happen then what would stop them? The god that Ben explains seems to be very weak and very humanlike in that they are trying to convince others of something instead of just making it happen. Also, if god was against slavery but didn’t think that humans were ready for a big change then why did he go out of his way to give rules about how to treat slaves? Why not just leave the subject alone? Why negotiate with humans about something immoral when you can simply tell people to stop doing it “or else”?

Brief Thoughts on the Ontological Argument

April 23, 2020 by Joe Gray in Philosophy, Religion, Thoughts, Epistemology

The ontological argument...

Anselm defined God as "a being that which no greater can be conceived", and argued that this being must exist in the mind, even in the mind of the person who denies the existence of God. He suggested that, if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality because if it exists only in the mind, then an even greater being must be possible—one which exists both in the mind and in reality. Therefore, this greatest possible being must exist in reality.

---- From Wikipedia

A Pleasant Haunting

September 04, 2019 by Joe Gray in Memoirs, Religion, Music

I have a complicated relationship with "The Church".

There are two types of churches that I attended growing up. One was the mainstream small-town Christian Church. It had youth groups, Sunday school, basketball hoops, and a few hundred people would show up each Sunday. I was in a youth group that was a religious version of the Boy Scouts called Awanas. We memorized Bible verses, had sack-races and I'm sure there was some kind of music involved. It was not an unpleasant experience and I was pretty good at memorizing lines from the Bible. Later I would despise the idea of rote memorization and to this day do not put much effort into memorizing things. The idea of memorizing information that someone else thinks is important is offensive.